Karl Kraus (1874 – 1936)
Austrian journalist, satirist, essayist, aphorist, playwright and poet.
An aphorism can never be the whole truth; it is either a half-truth or a truth-and-a-half.
To divide people into sadists and masochists is almost as foolish as dividing them into eaters and digesters. In all cases one must disregard abnormalities; after all, there are people who are better at digesting than they are at eating and vice versa. As regards masochism and sadism, it is safe to say that a healthy person displays both perversities. The only ugly thing in each case is the word. The one derived from the novelist Leopold von Sacher-Masoch is particularly degrading, and it is hard not to let one's taste for things be spoiled by the designation. Nevertheless, a man with an artistic imagination will manage to let an authentic woman turn him into a masochist and an inauthentic one into a sadist. One knocks the latter's educated unnaturalness out of her until the woman is revealed. If she already is a woman, the only thing left to do is adore her.
When I read, it is not acted literature; but what I write is written acting.
So-called psychoanalysis is the occupation of lustful rationalists who trace everything in the world to sexual causes - with the exception of their occupation.
I would have stage-fright if I had to speak with every one of the people before whom I speak.
The immorality of men triumphs over the amorality of women.
We are sacrificing ourselves for our ready-made goods; we are consumers and live in such a way that the means may consume the end.
The development of technology will leave only one problem: the infirmity of human nature.
Christianity has enriched the erotic meal with the appetizer of curiosity and the dessert of remorse.
The superman is a premature ideal, one that presupposes a man.
There is no more unfortunate creature under the sun than a fetishist who yearns for a woman's shoe and has to settle for the whole woman.
The woman takes one for all, and the man all for one.
Many things I am experiencing I already remember.
If I return some people's greetings, I do so only to give them their greeting back.
Nestroy's words ought to apply to an artist and an idea: "I have made a prisoner, and he won't let go of me!"
I no longer have collaborators. I used to be envious of them. They repel those readers whom I want to lose myself.
Squeeze human nature into a straitjacket of criminal justice and crime will appear!
The making of a journalist: no ideas and the ability to express them.